Leadership Quote by Hans Blix

“It was to do with information management” is the kind of bloodless phrasing that makes power legible. Hans Blix, the soft-spoken diplomat tasked with inspecting Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, isn’t describing a clerical hiccup. He’s pointing at the machinery that turns uncertainty into certainty on television. “Information management” sounds like filing; in context it reads as narrative control: selecting, timing, framing, and leaking material so it lands as a story with momentum rather than as a messy record of conflicting intelligence.

Then comes the sharper blade: “The intention was to dramatise it.” Dramatise what? Not facts, exactly, but the public’s perception of them. The subtext is that the most consequential decisions of the early 2000s weren’t merely argued; they were staged. The rhetorical move is devastating because Blix doesn’t accuse anyone of lying outright. He implies something more modern and arguably more corrosive: that the truth was treated as content, an asset to be packaged for maximum emotional yield.

As a diplomat, Blix’s restraint is the point. He speaks in the language of process, but the moral charge leaks through the passive construction. “The intention was…” avoids naming actors while still indicting intent. It’s an unusually candid admission from someone trained to keep doors open. In the post-9/11 climate, when urgency became a political resource, dramatization wasn’t decoration; it was a strategy to convert ambiguity into consent. Blix’s line stands as a reminder that wars can be sold not only with falsehoods, but with plot.